Description

Although DevOps is a relatively new phrase and concept, I’ve always adhered to its principles. Automation is one of the cornerstones of my career. From builds to deploys to installs, I’ve tried to wage a one-man war against manual setup checklists.

Unfortunately, automation has been hard on Windows and .NET. Batch scripts, VBScript, and WMI were never attractive technologies. I quickly jumped on MSBuild when it shipped, and used it successfully for most of my career.

Then I discovered PowerShell. I thank the Universe (and Microsoft) every day for PowerShell. I still punish myself for not learning it sooner.

In this presentation, I’ll outline my DevOps journey: from the beginning, trying to use batch scripts and VBScript as a full-time software engineer, to becoming a full-time configuration management architect using PowerShell. I’ll delve into the creation and use of my open-source PowerShell module, Carbon, which enables automated, repeatable setup of Windows computers.

We use Carbon and PowerShell at our company to automate the setup of developer computers and an eight server development environment. Spinning up this environment used to take weeks. With Carbon and PowerShell, it now takes a couple days. Configuring a developer computer used to take days. Now it takes ten minutes.

Speaking experience

I have done several training sessions around security and PowerShell to my company's internal development organization. I have never given this talk before.

Speaker

Biography

Aaron Jensen is a Build/Configuration Management/Software Engineer for WebMD Health Services in Portland, Oregon. He has worked as a web software engineer for twelve years, working mostly with Microsoft technologie.

He has used open source software throughout his career, and has made small contributions to the CruiseControl.NET and the MSBuild Extension Pack projects. In March of this year, he released Carbon, an automated, setup/configuration management framework, written in PowerShell.